Ubiquiti hardware - opinions?

[ljvb]

I currently have a 10 and 20 port Cisco SG300. When I moved, I picked up the Netgear Orbi to over my new house in short term (expensive, and kinda disappointed). Now that I have time, and am starting my renovations, I plan on wiring the house (first floor is easy, I have a crawl space, upper floors are harder).

Configuration will most likely be:
Edgeswitch or unifi switch (non POE)
unifi switch with POE to all ports (possibly 16.. to have space for future expansion).
unifi switch (the 2 of the 8 port ones which can be powered over POE with a passthrough port for office and upstairs backroom)
4 access points for inside
2 access points outside (1 regular, 1 mesh, regular will mount to side of house, to cover the yard, the other will be mounted to a pole at the end of my dock, there is power, but no ethernet)

I have been looking at the Ubiquiti stuff because their wireless and switching appears reasonably priced, and supports the functions I want (mostly vlans, coverage, weather resistant, security, enterprise features, mix of mesh and wired options). I am not sure about the quality or reliability of the products. The reviews seem mostly good, but I am just not sure, coming from the typical HP Aruba/Cisco enterprise environments.

 

[Haitch]

I've used the Ubiquiti edge routers - they've been totally solid. Have a customer using them for their primary firewall/router and wan end points.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

My Edgerouter Lite and Unifi AP-Pro have been mostly solid. Only issue was recently losing the Lite's internal USB drive (known issue with earlier versions) after many years of service and I'm sure numerous cold shutdowns, but that was fixed relatively easily.

A couple of articles you might find useful:
Tech | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/information...flecting-on-almost-three-years-with-pro-gear/

Unless your home is OMGHUGE or is of some older construction that's hostile to WiFi, 4+APs would seem to be overkill. How far away is this dock, and is there clear line-of-site? I think you might be better off using a proper WiFi bridge, such as the IsoBeam, to connect the locations. I don't believe a mesh-type setup would work well.

Any reason you can't use a regular switch in the rooms instead of a PoE unit? Or better yet, make additional cable runs to those locations instead. Pulling a few cables is really no more difficult than a single.

You're not planning to chuck the Cisco switches, right? Because there's no reason you can't use them for connections that don't require PoE.

What router?

 

[StammesOpfer]

UniFi AP are solid choices and great value. The UniFi switches are prices ok compared to new but when you can get great used stuff at better prices I have not been able to justify UniFi switches yet (especially with their lack of L3) but I would love to eventually goo 100% UniFi for that single pane view in the controller.

 

[K D]

I have an all Unifi stack running rock solid for the past 3 years for a similar setup. Can't recommend it enough. The AC-HD access point is not needed. You should be able to get by with a couple of AC pros like @BlueLineSwinger mentioned.

The POE is useful. I had initially cabled only 2 ports in my bedroom and needed more. I pulled in few more lines from the attic and dropped a poe switch there.

The unifi controller has come a long way and their mobile app has complete feature parity with their web app. When my openvpn VM went down and I was overseas, I was able to setup a new openvpn on the unifi controller from my phone and connect to my network.

 

[StevenDTX]

I drank the Kool-Aid! Its been a little over two years and I'm pretty happy.

 

[Occamsrazor]

You have 7 switches including two XGs in your house?

Nice setup. I just got 2 x NanoHD as my first Ubiquiti gear and quite like them, running the controler on my QNAP NAS. But still running pfSense for router and some Netgear switches. Really wish they would bring out some smaller port switches (like 8-24 port) with SFP+ though.....

 

[StevenDTX]

You have 7 switches including two XGs in your house?

With future plans for one more XG and one more 24 port PoE.

 

[ljvb]

My Edgerouter Lite and Unifi AP-Pro have been mostly solid. Only issue was recently losing the Lite's internal USB drive (known issue with earlier versions) after many years of service and I'm sure numerous cold shutdowns, but that was fixed relatively easily.

A couple of articles you might find useful:
Tech | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/information...flecting-on-almost-three-years-with-pro-gear/

Unless your home is OMGHUGE or is of some older construction that's hostile to WiFi, 4+APs would seem to be overkill. How far away is this dock, and is there clear line-of-site? I think you might be better off using a proper WiFi bridge, such as the IsoBeam, to connect the locations. I don't believe a mesh-type setup would work well.

Any reason you can't use a regular switch in the rooms instead of a PoE unit? Or better yet, make additional cable runs to those locations instead. Pulling a few cables is really no more difficult than a single.

You're not planning to chuck the Cisco switches, right? Because there's no reason you can't use them for connections that don't require PoE.

What router?

The house is not that large, about 2600 sq feet across two levels. I have not looked into the wifi bridge yet, might be a better option. The end of the dock is about 200f from my house.

As for the PoE units, it's mostly to save a plug. It is an older house that lacks a lot of plugs, so a TV and tivo/xbox/whatever take up quite a few plugs, and I don't want to run a bunch of extension cords. Running cat6/coax is not that much of a problem, but it would save a few hundred feet of cable from the panel (I still need to install).

I have no decided on whether I will keep the Cisco switched. I had replaced them with 2 blade switches, but my wife made me shut that down (C3000) as my electricity bill was around $300 a month.

My router is pfsense only because it has a pretty point and click interface I can walk my wife through when there is a problem while I am travelling. I actually have 3 firewalls, 1 at home (pfsense), 2 on AWS (regular freebsd/pf/openvpn).

 

[StammesOpfer]

A single access point should easily cover a 2600 sq/ft 2-story. Though type of construction matters.

I have a 2800 sq/ft 2-story (standard wood frame and drywall) and I am using an UAP-HD mounted on the ceiling of the second floor roughly centered in the house and have wifi still in the neighbors yard. The UAP-HD is overkill even for my house but I got it at beta prices so it made sense.

For the dock you probably are able to use just a directional AP mounted on the house facing that direction and get all the coverage you need.

 

[ljvb]

A single access point should easily cover a 2600 sq/ft 2-story. Though type of construction matters.

I have a 2800 sq/ft 2-story (standard wood frame and drywall) and I am using an UAP-HD mounted on the ceiling of the second floor roughly centered in the house and have wifi still in the neighbors yard. The UAP-HD is overkill even for my house but I got it at beta prices so it made sense.

For the dock you probably are able to use just a directional AP mounted on the house facing that direction and get all the coverage you need.

I'll start with one if you think they have decent range and penetration. it's a standard stick/drywall house.

Side note, while I was looking at the edgemax as I prefer layer3, I don't require it. what I do require is vlans and ssid per vlan. Will the unifi switches suffice? at least 3 ssids, general, guest, and IOT (which will likely be broken down further into trusted IOT and untrusted IOT)

 

[StammesOpfer]

UniFi is certainly capable of doing that. The limitation is only if you need any serious inter-vlan routing speed.

Also if you are doing IoT VLAN. mDNS is heavily used and you may need a proxy/relay of some sort for some devices to function as expected.

 

[CookiesLikeWhoa]

I too have drank the Unifi Kool-Aid...
Needless to say I have a lot of their products spread out over our property. I really do like the system.
My couple of reservations are:

• The larger POE switches tend to dump a lot of heat, and are noisy.
• The wireless mesh system in the AP's is great for picking up when a wired connection is lost, but it does not drop automatically when the wired connection is restored, causing a headache.
• The copper ports on the US-16-XG's will not work with Intel NICs. This is a known issue and still has not been resolved.

Other than that I really like them.

 

[ljvb]

I will stick with the Unifi APs, but I may stick with cisco for switching, found WS-C3560X-24P-L for $150, downside, it has the wrong power supplies to support PoE+ ... I keep flipping back and forth on what I want for switches, but the APs I will stick with, and the 8 port poe powered switches for 2 of the rooms..

 

[StammesOpfer]

Nothing wrong with using an injector or two if you don't have a bunch of POE devices. It will certainly save some money and may allow you to use existing equipment.

 

[Jannis Jacobsen]

I’ve moved to Mikrotik from Ubiquiti

-j

 

[billc.cn]

I think the reviewers' favourite in the AP world is currently TP-Link's EAP series. They offer more features and better throughput compared to similarly-priced Unify and has a built-in Web GUI. They also use standard PoE.

As for switches, I think a used enterprise L2+ switch with 2-4 10G SFP+ ports will be a much better investment than a prosumer Ubiquiti. They provide proper inter-VLAN forwarding and firewalling which is very useful for setting up a separate secure Wifi for IoT stuff for example.

The very lowest end Dell 5524 gives you two SFP+ ports, 128Gbps switching fabric (fully non-blocking), consumes only 30W and frequently trades at <$100 on eBay. Ubiquiti doesn't offer anything near this performance at even the $400 price level.

 

[ljvb]

I think the reviewers' favourite in the AP world is currently TP-Link's EAP series. They offer more features and better throughput compared to similarly-priced Unify and has a built-in Web GUI. They also use standard PoE.

As for switches, I think a used enterprise L2+ switch with 2-4 10G SFP+ ports will be a much better investment than a prosumer Ubiquiti. They provide proper inter-VLAN forwarding and firewalling which is very useful for setting up a separate secure Wifi for IoT stuff for example.

The very lowest end Dell 5524 gives you two SFP+ ports, 128Gbps switching fabric (fully non-blocking), consumes only 30W and frequently trades at <$100 on eBay. Ubiquiti doesn't offer anything near this performance at even the $400 price level.

I looked at the 5524p and 5548p, but they only support 15W per port. Enough for most APs, but not enough for Cameras that will be coming. I'm still leaning towards WS-C3750E-48PD-SF that I can get for less than $200.

 

[epicurean]

Its true you get better value with the Dell 5524 and the Ciscos. But for a homelab where noise can be a big issue, the US-16-150W, and the US-16-XG are so quiet, only their lights let u know its actually on.

 

[Dawg10]

As part of my camera setup I have two fanless Zyxel GS1900-8HP remote managed 8-port L2 GbE PoE switches; they also make 10/16/24/48-port models. The 8-port model can deliver up to 30W/port with a unit max. of 70W.

Switch#1 is under the deck and is cabled back to the rack in the garage. This switch currently handles 3 PoE cams; 2 fixed and 1 ptz. If a cam screws up I log into the switch and cycle power to the port. The 3 cams are presently pulling 17.3W and I plan on adding a few more to the mix.

Switch#2 is located in a garden shed that I ran power to last year. Plugged into it are 2 cams and a EnGenius ECB350 multi-function wireless device configured as a client bridge; all 3 are PoE and can be remotely cycled. More cams are going here as well.

I also have a third GS1900-8HP waiting to be installed with more cameras. Nice switch for $100; they're outside and survived -35C last winter, even though 2 of the cams refused to work at that temp. They may not be robust enough for your needs but they work very well, and permit relatively cheap segmentation.